News: Swiss architecture studio Herzog & de Meuron has been selected to design a visual culture museum in Hong Kong's new West Kowloon Cultural District.
Selected ahead of a shortlist of architects that included SANAA, Renzo Piano, Toyo Ito, Snøhetta and Shigeru Ban, Herzog & de Meuron will work alongside UK firm TFP Farrells to deliver the M+ museum on Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour, giving the city a dedicated centre for twentieth and twenty-first century art, design, architecture and film.
M+ is scheduled to complete in 2017 and will be one of the first buildings to open in the West Kowloon Cultural District, which is being masterplanned by London office Foster + Partners and is set to contain a total of 17 cultural venues around a 14-hectare city park.
Design critic Aric Chen was appointed curator of design and architecture for M+Â last summer. He told Dezeen that the museum will help to "place Asia at the centre" of design history, rather than on the periphery as western curators have done.
Other venues underway in the West Kowloon Cultural District include a Chinese opera designed by Vancouver-based architect Bing Thom and Hong Kong-based architect Ronald Lu. See all our coverage of the West Kowloon Cultural District.
Herzog & de Meuron was also recently selected to design the new National Library of Israel, after the initial competition winner was dismissed over a copyright dispute. Other new projects by the studio include a 57-storey tower for Miami and the completed Messe Basel exhibition centre. See more architecture by Herzog & de Meuron.
Here's a short statement from Herzog & de Meuron:
Herzog & de Meuron win competition to design M+
The West Kowloon Cultural District Authority has appointed Herzog & de Meuron to design the new building for M+. Based on the recommendation of an international selection jury, Herzog & de Meuron were selected ahead of five other short-listed architecture firms. M+ is the new museum for visual culture in Hong Kong, focusing on 20th and 21st century art, design, architecture and moving image. The building will be situated on the waterfront of Victoria Harbour at the edge of a planned 14-hectare park. It will be one of the first projects to be completed in the West Kowloon Cultural District, and a key venue in creating interdisciplinary exchange between the visual arts and the performing arts in Asia.